Now that we had federated searching capability, we wanted to know what resources in Find Articles were most popular and how the remote repository connections were working for our users.

Here is a chart of search activity in Find Articles, by repository or database, using data from the ENCompass Oracle tables.  Note that the yellow portion of each bar represents the number of failed searches.  These failures could be due to:

too many users
remote server down
our server down
license/subscription interruption

As I mentioned earlier, users only get one generic “search failed” message, regardless of the reason for the failure.

“Successful zero hits,” the light blue portion of each bar, represented searches that did not return any hits but did not result in a database failure.  Successful hits are in purple.

If you look at PubMed, eight from the left, you can see that the number of failures far exceeded the number of successes.  Thanks to this analysis, we were able to recognize the problem and remove PubMed from Find Articles until such time we could find a solution.